General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Do you trust health care providers who have worked with ebola to self monitor? [View all]Yo_Mama
(8,303 posts)I DO, in fact, trust returning HCW to check their temps and report if they appear to be developing significant illness.
I ALSO believe that a three week quarantine is necessary to ensure public safety. There are bunch of very small risks which are not covered with self-monitoring which are covered with a supervised quarantine. Here's a list of some:
1) Pre-acute phase spread to close contacts (highly unlikely, but apparently suggested by case histories from Africa, such as the little girl who just died in Mali).
2) Sudden acute illness NOT arising from Ebola (you can certainly be co-infected or have other conditions which may trigger collapse) causing public exposure.
3) Accidental injury in public.
Epidemiology is a numbers game. The reason why the contact tracing is being done in Africa is to catch the small risks which are adding up to continued contagion.
I think supervised quarantine away from families should be offered to all HCW caring for Ebola patients in the US and should be mandatory for all travelers with significant risks leaving the Ebola zones.
CDC has a summary of the Firestone methodology and its results up on its website:
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6342a6.htm?s_cid=mm6342a6_w
The methods used successfully prevented Firestone's clinics from becoming sources of infection, although there are continued cases there, mostly stemming from outside the Firestone district. One of the issues in Firestone's experience were cases not recognized to be Ebola that needed treatment.
A little bit of overkill is the way to go given the history of this Ebola epidemic in Africa.